The Coruscant Scenario
by Exterminatus Extremis
Summary: Years before the events of Halo Versus Star Wars: Genesis, Sheppard made the true first contact between the galaxies. This is his story.


_**The Coruscant Scenario**_

A _Halo Versus Star Wars_ Story

By Exterminatus Extremis

**Chapter 1: Out of Gas**

Grey seems to be the color of the world. At one point, it may have been a sprawling, green and blue forest world, but no living or artificial memory knows. By some measure, it is a forest world. Kilometers-high trees of metal and stone dominate the entirety of the surface, cut by flat plains of shining silver metallurgy. Here and there rivers of ships run through the air, following a complex but recognizable latticework of streams and creeks. Beneath it all, caverns that made the roots of the trees have their own independent ecosystems.

One such cavern, deep beneath the city world, holds three creatures that are even more unnatural than their artificial surroundings. Green skin and orange faces demonstrate their differing view from the uniform grey. Beneath the skin lies a more familiar appearance, yet still alien in ways no one can place. Somehow, they are just wrong compared to similar faces around them.

Like fish out of water, they don't belong. This is not their world. In more ways than one, they are foreign.

"Sheppard. Wake up, it's time to go."

**~O~**

"Spartan Mauve Team, this is Sheppard. Status reports."

"Harold here. Alive, despite my bunk's best efforts."

"Krista here. Green. The hangar isn't, though.

"Sarah here. Engineering's a mess."

"Beth here. The mess hall is a wreck. Half of it's exposed to space. What the hell happened?" Sheppard stood, clearing his head. They were scattered across the ship. They were en route to a system under attack by the Covenant. It was their third day in Slipspace when the captain sounded a general alarm and warned the crew to brace for impact. Then the ship had lurched and Sheppard had gone tumbling down the corridor he was in to smack against sealed blast doors.

"What was that about Engineering, Sarah?" he asked. He peeled himself off of the bulkhead easily enough; gravity was no longer functioning. The float down the hallway was interrupted by him pushing aside a pair of Marines who hadn't been wearing full gear like he was. He came to a sealed door and tapped the control panel to open it. Emergency power was still active and it hissed open to reveal the mess hall.

The large room looked like something had taken a bite out of it. There was a circular hole in the outer side of the room that spanned up and down the decks. Dimly, Sheppard made out the shapes of a few off-duty crew members strewn about the wreckage. Chunks of metal drifted about the area just "outside" of the ship.

At the far end of the now narrow walkway along the bar was another sealed door. The window in that door afforded him a view of the still-flaming corridor beyond. He glanced behind the bar to find Beth seated against the inside of the counter, a pair of holes in the floor next to her where she'd anchored her hands. She wore her green MJOLNIR Mark V armor, one of the few remaining undamaged sets. Her role as a sniper generally kept her out of heavier combat.

Beth, unlike a lot of snipers Sheppard had met, was generally a bubbly person. It was rare for her to not be smiling about something when they weren't in combat. That did not, however, make her bad at her job. She wasn't nearly as good as the legendary Linda, but he'd be damned if she weren't close. Beth was also downright vicious at card games.

"Thanks for opening the door, sir. I got stuck on this side when whatever happened, happened." She stood. "Any idea what that was?" Sheppard shook his head.

"Sarah, what's happened to Engineering?" he asked. After a brief crackle and some unhappy noises from the other end of the feed, the other Spartan answered.

"Like I said, sir, it's a mess. The crew are all dead down here. Some kind of coolant leak, I don't know. I happened to be in the corridor just outside when the ship got hit and the impact tossed me in. Some crates are in my way now, give me a moment to move them."

"Harold here. I got to the bridge. It's been vented. I found someone who was strapped in, sir. It looks like he's got acceleration wounds. His entire body's been uniformly crushed. Not sure how that could have happened, though." Harold reached down and tapped at the dead crewman's console. He whistled. "Sir, I figured out what happened. I think."

"Go ahead."

"We were yanked out of Slipspace by something. The sudden deceleration caused severe stresses throughout the ship and ruptured more than one deck. I have no idea what could have done that, though. Think it's the Covenant?"

"There's no way to know for sure. For now, we have to assume the possibility of attack. Find a weapon if you haven't done so. Finding and securing any survivors is a priority." By this time Sheppard and Beth had reached a maintenance shaft that would take them down to the hangar deck. That was where Krista was. He felt more than heard the ship groaning around them as the metal shifted.

"Good news, sir," Harold spoke up. "Most of the ship is fine. The outer areas took a beating, but the interior is mostly still intact. The atmosphere's almost gone, though. I guess the failsafes didn't work." The voice in Sheppard's ear became grim. "As far as I can tell, there won't be any survivors unless someone got to an oh-two mask. I'll see about getting the air systems back online. This place is busted to Hell and back."

Harold was the second of the three men on Mauve Team. He was also the biggest member of the team in both height and girth. He was surprisingly something of a technical specialist, or, at least, he knew more than the rest of them about various technologies. Whereas Beth could be described as aggressively happy, Harold had always been somewhat pessimistic. And he loved to complain.

A crash sounded over the link.

"I got the crates moved, sir," came Sarah's voice. "I'll check on the cryo bay and see if anyone survived there..." her voice trailed off and a low "ohh" came over the speaker.

"Sarah, report."

"Good news, sir. I found a survivor. He actually managed to find an air tank before the vacuum could kill him. Probably hyperventilated, though, and I'd bet he has decompression sickness. He's unconscious. Orders?" One survivor meant that there were probably more. None of the Spartans had any real engineering experience or training, certainly nothing that would allow them to get the ship moving again. If they could find even one person who could, their options would get a whole lot better very quickly. A commtech at the very least would know how to rig a beacon.

"Harold, what's the status on the infirmary?" Sheppard asked.

"That was one of the few places that retained any atmosphere. Judging by the cameras, it's kind of a mess right now. I'll mark it on Sarah's HUD."

Sheppard came out of the maintenance shaft into a hallway with a black line trailing across the middle of the wall led his gaze to the next turn in the hallway. Black meant the hangar. He pushed a few bodies out of the way as he walked along with Beth behind him. Their magnetic boots made slight clanging noises through their suits. Three turns later, they found a large bulkhead that read HANGAR in tall black letters. It was sealed against the sudden depressurization of the dropout. At his touch the keypad lit up and the door opened.

He stepped back just in time to avoid being crushed by a flying warthog. The vehicle had been torn loose from its mounting and was drifting around the hangar in the lack of gravity. Other objects had suffered a similar fate. As he watched, a trio of crates spun lazily out of the crumpled hangar doors.

One object had managed to remain stationary, though. A pelican drop ship, one of the two on the small ship. The other was, curiously, missing. That didn't puzzle Sheppard too much. His focus was on the pelican that remained. Its running lights were active and something was moving in the cockpit. The back hatch opened and another green giant stepped out.

Krista was something of a wild card as far as Spartans went. Sheppard had watched her pick off enemies with as much passion as one might expect from making a bank transfer, but he had also seen her leap atop a charging Brute and, screaming, beat its head in with its own helmet. She had no recollection of the event, and was later ruled fit for duty and sound of mind. Similar events happened to her at different points in their career, but she was never taken off of active duty. It was a side effect of the surgeries that turned them into Spartans, or so they'd been told. Sheppard knew better, though. Krista had always been...overzealous during their training as children.

She gestured him over. "I've got a live one, sir. He was servicing the Pelican when the alarm sounded." She tapped on the hull of the drop ship and someone wearing a pressure suit clambered out behind her. He was holding a toolkit and, for some reason, a sidearm that he probably took out of the Pelican.

"Engineer Harris, sir," he said. "Who else made it?"

Elsewhere, Sarah set the unconscious crewman down on one of the beds in the infirmary. He looked better already, being back in a pressurized environment. The human body simply wasn't built to withstand open space for any long period of time. This man hadn't been in a completely depressurized compartment, which helped his chances. She fished around in the drawers for the few things she remembered from basic training and administered what treatments she could.

Sarah was level-headed and tame compared to her teammates. She was also the most intelligent by score and Sheppard's second-in-command. Sheppard had admitted on more than one occasion that her tactical mindset was devilishly brilliant. And no one had beaten her in hand-to-hand combat since before the augmentation. She was also very playful when appropriate and often sarcastic when not, which brought a little life to the squad.

"Sarah, this is Sheppard. We've got another survivor. How's the first one doing?" She sighed and turned to leave to continue searching for more survivors. She opened the link.

"I think he's going to be fine. I wish we had Jake with us. This was more of his kind of work." Jake was resting up back on Reach after their last mission. He had been a little too close to a plasma mortar and would probably lose most of his right hand, but that was a minor inconvenience for a Spartan. The only thing keeping him from duty was that his armor had been severely damaged as well. Jake had been the squad's impromptu medic.

"Harold here. I think I've gotten the pipes working again, and the internal sensors finally finished booting up. You should probably come to the bridge, sir. You'll want to see this."

**~O~**

"This" turned out to be the detailed sensor readings on the rest of the ship. The fast frigate would never move again, that much was certain. Sarah had been right about the coolant leak. Most of it was in the void now, and without that, they weren't going to get the Shaw-Fujikawa engine online anytime soon, even if they knew how. The readout also confirmed that there were no remaining crewman except the two they'd rescued. Engineer Harris turned out to be a commtech and Sheppard immediately set him to knocking together a beacon from whatever he could find. The communications array and emergency beacons were all destroyed or spaced when the ship was forced out of Slipspace.

The other survivor was another engineer that worked on the engines, which made Sheppard slightly more hopeful about their chances.

There was one other significant issue. The astronavigation system had booted up along with the internal sensors. After a moment, it spat out an error message. It couldn't make any sense of what was around them. Apparently none of the stars were familiar.

"Ok, then, what's next?" Sheppard voiced his thoughts aloud. They were in the infirmary with the still-unconscious crewman. His ID tag told them his name was C. Teng. Harold was still on the bridge trying to get everything working. Harris was still constructing the beacon.

"Well, the good news is that most of the emergency supplies are still where they're supposed to be," Sarah put in. She had taken a quick look around the ship and found that, provided the bulkheads were still there, so were the items attached to them.

"At least we won't immediately starve to death, and we have the Pelican if we ever have to leave quickly. I have no idea where we'll go, but we can leave." Sheppard shook his head. This was a textbook example of a worst-case scenario. No engines, no communications, and no navigation even if they had one of those things. He was just glad his team was still alive.

"Well, I guess that's that. Lacking any other options, we'll just have to survive as long as we can." He walked stiffly out of the medical bay. "Let me know when he wakes up." Sheppard continued down the hall before he heard boots behind him.

"Sheppard." He continued walking. "Sheppard." He continued. The sound of boots also continued, until the person calling his name reached out to his shoulder. He swatted off a green gauntlet.

"John." At the very, very uncommon use of his first name, he stopped. Few people called him John because their leader, John-117, was already well-known. Because of this, Mendez had called him Sheppard, which had apparently been his civilian surname. He was the only one. Every other Spartan had been stripped of any ties to their civilian life, but Sheppard's civilian life was nearly nonexistant. His parents had died shortly after he was born due to a flood. There was no civilian life to tie him to.

"John, there's nothing you can do. We're stranded here. Don't start getting frustrated or we'll never survive." Sheppard kept walking. The voice continued. "There's nothing you can do."

"Exactly." He came up short at a stretch of windows that opened out into the void. An hour ago, it was possible to see debris drifting past, but it was empty stars now. He turned his head slightly. "What do you think is going to happen to the colony we were reinforcing, Sarah? Those civilians we were supposed to lift, the Marines that are trapped there? We don't know where we are even if the engines worked, and I doubt the atmosphere scrubbers will last long enough for someone to find us." He looked back to the window and shook his head. "The best humanity has to offer, and we die like rats in a sinking ship."

Spartans were, contrary to popular impression, not emotionless and completely level-headed. They presented themselves that way for several reasons, mainly to keep up their facade of invulnerability. Like many soldiers, Sheppard had an instinctive distaste for traveling in space. This wasn't due to a fear of being lost out in the void or being blasted into space. A lot of ground troops simply didn't like that there was nothing they could do in a dangerous situation but sit quietly and wait for the crew to sort it out. If the ship was boarded, they would pull their weight, but that was fairly unlikely. Now, those fears had vindication.

"Even rats fight to survive. Sir."

**~O~**

The mission clock read 12:31:20. It had only been twelve hours since the forced dropout. Teng had woken up shortly after Sheppard's conversation with Sarah. As it turned out, he was one of the engineers that worked on the engines. Unfortunately, there was nothing to be done for them. According to the engineer, they would need a completely different engine put in. A ship as old as the one they inhabited would probably just be decommissioned and scuttled for scrap to build another ship.

He sat up. He'd only gotten a few hours' rest at the insistence of his team. Something about needing him in top condition. Sheppard got the idea that they wanted him to take a break so that he could actually function instead of worrying about their situation.

"Status report," he said into the radio. A few "green" reports came back, with the accompanying news that Harris had finished and deployed the beacon. What good it would do, they could only guess at. Sheppard got up from the floor where he'd sat against the wall to sleep and walked to the infirmary, where they had set up their communal area and stored any supplies they could easily move. He removed his helmet and tore open a ration pack. Beef flavored protein and nutrient blocks scattered out onto the tray and he dumped them into a bowl of hot water.

He sat at a counter and sipped the concoction idly while he flicked through a datapad rolling off statistics about the ship. Harold had apparently been busy. A good portion of primary systems were back online, if still slightly unreliable. Long range sensors and astronavigation were still temperamental at best, though it had been established that there was nothing nearby.

"I've got good news," came Harold's phlegmatic voice, "though it is a little confusing. Everyone should come to the bridge."

Upon arriving at the bridge, Sheppard found that he was the last one there. Harold was smiling proudly as he indicated the sensors station. It was a mess of wires and a pair of datapads that had seen better days, but it was functioning.

"Long range sensors have just detected a ship. It's too early to tell what or whose it is, but it is definitely a ship. Oddly, though, it just sort of appeared out of nowhere. The display was blank one moment, and then it was there. It isn't too big, either. I was thinking that it doesn't really matter whose it is. If it's ours, they'll pick us up. If it's Covenant..." he trailed off. There was silence for a moment. Harold was rarely pleasant about most things, so this demeanor came as a surprise.

"We take it, you mean?" Beth offered.

"Exactly. They have a working Slipspace drive, and learning to fly the thing can't be that difficult. Even if it is, they probably have better communication systems than we do, and that alone is – " Sheppard interrupted him.

"We get it, Harold, we're going to get off this derelict. The quicker we get there, the better. Just in case it is the Covenant, though, I want everyone to get down to the Pelican. That way we can leave if we need to." The team nodded and began to leave the bridge when the console beeped. Harold looked it over, then his eyes went up.

"Projectiles inbound!"

* * *

**AN:** But why has he abandoned the _Reach _storyline? I haven't. I had a very good idea, and in the space of a few days managed to write out the plan for this story. This is going to be considerably longer than any previous work I've done, about forty chapters if I'm not mistaken. If I am, oh well, more story for those who read it.

I'll also be releasing these in a different way than I have previously. Instead of chapter by chapter (this first one not included) I will release them in blocks of a to-be-determined size relevant to their story arcs (though they won't strictly be arcs). This serves two purposes: it keeps me from making continuity errors and it ensures production in a roundabout way. I may only release one of these blocks a year depending upon how well I end up writing. At least this way, when I do release something, it will be several somethings instead of one short something.

But that's a ways off. This is a teaser, nothing more.

Oh, and about _Reach_: I'll continue writing that as I have the inspiration for it. Just because one has a plan, after all...

One more thing. Before people start asking, yes, Sheppard was named after the guy from Stargate Atlantis. I didn't actually make this character, a friend of mine did and said that that's his name. Because fiction needs another Sheppard/Shepherd/Shepperd/wobbilyjack etc.


End file.
